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Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

arxiv.org

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Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#391

Post by DocTomoe »

nlnn wrote: post #360
DocTomoe wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to think of AI as cars: You can go to the Walmart outside town on foot. And carry your stuff back. But it is much faster - and less exhaustive - to use the car. Which means you can spend more quality time on things you enjoy.

The problem is that when it's for work, the company now knows you have access to a car, so sends you on 20x the trips. You have no more quality time, and your physical health suffers from lack of exercise.

Which is exactly why many jobs actively require a driver's license where I live.

The car analogy has that covered already. When Guttenberg was printing bibles, those things sold like warm bread rolls - these days, printing books is barely profitable. The trick with new disruptive tech always is to be an early adopter - not the long tail.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#392

Post by DocTomoe »

moffkalast wrote: post #329
DocTomoe wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to think of AI as cars: You can go to the Walmart outside town on foot. And carry your stuff back. But it is much faster - and less exhaustive - to use the car. Which means you can spend more quality time on things you enjoy.

And then you drive to the gym to run on a treadmill for two hours.

Enter "Coding Bootcamps" and "Hackathons"

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#393

Post by DocTomoe »

lm28469 wrote: post #328
DocTomoe wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like to think of AI as cars: You can go to the Walmart outside town on foot. And carry your stuff back. But it is much faster - and less exhaustive - to use the car. Which means you can spend more quality time on things you enjoy.

You got it backwards, there wouldn't be a walmart outside of town if there were no cars, you'd walk to the local butcher/baker/whatever in <10min.

Yes, but there are cars. That genie has already escaped its bottle.

And you pay small local stores with higher prices - which leads to more people, even in such small-towns with local butchers and bakers to get into their ride and go to the Lidl or Aldi on the outskirts.

Much like companies will realise LLM-using devs are more efficient by some random metric (do I hear: Story points and feature counts?), and will require LLM use from their employees.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#394

Post by bootsmann »

ben_w wrote: post #390
bootsmann wrote: post #287

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the other hand, maybe abacuses and written language won't be the downfall of humanity, destroying our ability to hold numbers and memorize long passages of narrative, after all The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though. We rely on calculators because they eclipse us in _any_ calculation, we rely on books because they store the stories permanently, but if I use…

> The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though Not sure about books. Between self-help, religion, and New Age, I'd guess quite a lot of books not marked as fiction are making false claims.

Thats not what I meant tho, the point about books is that they store information reliably. If I write something down, within most reasonable settings it will still be the same text when I read it back. That means if I write something down instead of remembering it, the writing will outperform me in storing this information. Same with the calculator, the calculator will always perform at least as good as me at arithmetics. There is no calculation on which the calculator can randomly fail, leading me to do it by hand, so I don't need to retain the skill of doing it by hand. The same can not be said about LLMs and that is the issue.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#395

Post by Kon5ole »

risyachka wrote: post #302

This is exactly why there is no point in using AI for coding unless in rare fee cases. Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc. Code with AI - skills decline after merely a week or two, you forget how to think and because of relying on AI for simpler and simpler tasks - your total output is less and worse that in you were to diy it.

>Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc.

That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed. ;-)

I think developers as a group have a tendency to spend too much time "inside baseball" and forget what the tools we're good at are actually used for.

Farmers don't defend the scythe, spend time doing leetscythe katas or go to scything seminars. They think about the harvest.

(Ok, some farmers started the sport of Tractor Pulling when the tractor came along and forgot about the harvest but still!) :)

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#396

Post by bootsmann »

Kon5ole wrote: post #395
risyachka wrote: post #302

This is exactly why there is no point in using AI for coding unless in rare fee cases. Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc. Code with AI - skills decline after merely a week or two, you forget how to think and because of relying on AI for simpler and simpler tasks - your total output is less and worse that in you were to diy it.

>Code without AI - sharp skills, your brain works and you come up with better solutions etc. That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed. ;-) I think developers as a group have a tendency to spend too much time "inside baseball" and forget what the tools we're good at are actually used for. Farmers don't defend the scythe, spend time doing leetscythe katas or go to scything seminars. They think abo…

> That train of thought leads to writing assembly language in ed

Hard disagree, LLVM will always outperform me in writing assembly, it won't just give up and fail randomly when it meets a particularly non-trivial problem, causing me to write assembly by hand to fix it. If LLMs would be 100% reliable on the tasks I had to do, I don't think anyone here would seriously debate about the issue of mental attrition (i.e. you don't see people complaining about calculators). The problem is that in too many cases, the LLM will only get so far and you will still have to switch to doing actual programming to get the task finished and the worse you get at that last part the more your skillset converges to exactly the type of things an LLM (and therefore everyone else with a keyboard) can reliably do.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#397

Post by ben_w »

bootsmann wrote: post #394
ben_w wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The abacus, the calculator and the book don't randomly get stuff wrong in 15% of cases though Not sure about books. Between self-help, religion, and New Age, I'd guess quite a lot of books not marked as fiction are making false claims.

Thats not what I meant tho, the point about books is that they store information reliably. If I write something down, within most reasonable settings it will still be the same text when I read it back. That means if I write something down instead of remembering it, the writing will outperform me in storing this information. Same with the calculator, the calculator will always perform at least as good as me at arithme…

Sure, but also that's not what (generative) AI are for.

If you want reliable list of facts, use (or tell the AI to use) a search engine and a file system… just then you need whatever system you use to be able to tell if your search for "Jesus" was in the Christian missionary sense, or the "ICE arrested Jesús Cruz" sense, or you wanted the poem in the Whitehouse v Lemon case, or if you were just swearing.

If you can't tell which you wanted, the books being constant doesn't help.

> There is no calculation on which the calculator can randomly fail, leading me to do it by hand, so I don't need to retain the skill of doing it by hand.

I've seen it happen, e.g. on my phone the other week, because Apple's note-based calculator strips unrecognised symbols, which means when you copy-paste from a place where "." is the decimal separator, while your system settings say you use "," as a decimal separator, it gives an answer off by some power of ten… but I've also just today discovered that doing this the other way around on macOS (system setting "." as separator) it strips the stuff before the decimal.

Just in case my writing is unclear, here's a specific example, *with the exact same note* (as in, it's auto-shared by iCloud and recomputing the answer locally) on macOS (where "." is my separator):

  123,45 / 2 ‎ = 22.5
  123.45 / 2 ‎ = 61.725
and iOS (","):

  123,45 / 2 ‎ = 61,725
  123.45 / 2 ‎ = 6.172,5
And that's without data entry failure. I've had to explain to a cashier that if I have three items that are each less than £1, the total cannot possibly be more than £3.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#398

Post by solumunus »

matusp wrote: post #336

I wonder to what extent this is caused by the writing style LLMs have. They just love beating around the bush, repeat themselves, use fillers, etc. I often find it hard to find the signal in the noise, but I guess that it is inevitable with the way they work. I can easily imagine my brain shutting down when I have to parse this sort of output.

Instruct it to be concise.

Re: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task

#400

Post by pepa65 »

groestl wrote: post #369
llamasushi wrote: post #279

Socrates: "And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the…

> You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; Tell me you don't have ADHD without telling me you don't have ADHD (or even knowing what ADHD is, yet) ;)

You think Socrates had ADHD??
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